Wes Baker Email & Phone Number

Fredericksburg, Va, Us

- Built a small organization of two teams that manage domains and TLS (SSL) certificates for all merchants across Shopify ↳ Recruited both internally and externally to build up my team and managed onboarding while helping the new team members quickly integrate with the team. ↳ Helped grow other interviewers to help meet audacious hiring goals (2k+ engineers).- Built processes for on-call (and responding to our various support channels), onboarding new team members, leading projects, pair programming, and mentoring fellow team members- Worked across multiple teams to ensure critical services would be able to handle Black Friday/Cyber Monday scale demands.- Debugged, diagnosed, worked with procurement and product, and shipped a fix for certain TLDs not working due to a price cap no one on my team was aware of in under a week.- Added automation to ensure we keep track of what's happening within our small section of the Shopify core for when other teams make modifications.- Consolidated and clarified Slack channels to improve communication between our team and other teams.- Established good vendor relationships with our domain registrar and certificate authority- Built out roadmaps alongside product and UX

Remote

- Introduced the RFC process to improve visibility and employee impact and involvement and to reduce the number of questions asked later in the project.- Removed meetings to give engineers more uninterrupted time to write code.- Created a culture of testing by enforcing unit test coverage and reintroducing Cypress integration tests to improve confidence towards continues deployment.- Greatly improved our local development situation by debugging, diagnosing, and fixing problems with docker-compose and MongoDB replica set connectivity issues that affected more than half of our engineers.- Started off as a manager with no reports, recruited my entire team, and then helped the single large team grow into two separate teams with different responsibilities.- Championed, managed, and built a dashboard to help product, sales, and management see (and articulate) the impact of our application through metrics like courses created, proposals created, and average time to finish a proposal.

Remote

I started as an individual contributor (again), quickly started working on technical leadership, and was promoted to engineering manager about a year and a half in.- Lead a team of 4-6 distributed engineers (continental United States, Hungary, Brazil) as both a hands-on technical leader and people leader.- Worked closely with product management, design, and quality assurance to ensure our projects were planned *enough* to reduce the number of surprises.- Delegated technical leadership to every member of my team through a documented process of collaboration with product, design, and QA.- Wrote code in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (React), and Clojure.- Reviewed code on a regular basis as means to ensure quality, encourage best practices, and maintain knowledge of the codebase.- Deployed the application and served on the on-call rotation.

Remote

- Wrote back-end code in Ruby on Rails and front-end code in JavaScript (React). Additionally, I also worked on two microservices written in Clojure.- Provided code reviews for other engineers on the team.- Refined our planning process to include product management, design, and quality assurance as soon as possible to ensure our acceptance criteria matched the expectations of everyone involved.- Created a checklist to ensure we didn't miss commonly forgotten elements when planning projects (e.g. where is it in the navigation, what permissions are necessary, when do we need feature flags).- Worked with product management, design, and QA to design and architect features (e.g. categorized content that could be made relevant to various learners and made available in the library).- Deployed the application on a recurring basis (every couple of months).- Was on the early on-call rotation as we figured out what on-call was going to look like and how to solve our problems.

Remote

I grew from an individual contributor to the company’s CTO by bridging the gap between technical skills and management skills. - Automated the release process to reduce errors and speed up the process, seeing a 250% reduction in build time.- Migrated the team from Mercurial to Git to allowing us to increase our release velocity and the speed of bug fixes.- Refactored our Updater code: took a 7+ step process to four simple steps.- Created a deprecation log system to capture and notify our third-party developers about outdated code in their add-ons, letting us remove old and outdated code in months, not years.- Modernized our technical documentation, including improved Docblocks (with parameters and returns documented) and similar structures for our user facing documentation, reducing the time spent studying the code for both our staff and the developers in our community.- Established weekly one-on-one meetings and biannual reviews for our development team which helped employees learn where they need to improve and grow.

Remote

Blacksburg, Va

- Evaluated and chose a new CMS (ExpressionEngine), and trained our staff to use it which led to faster development (and lower costs as a result) and the ability to do much more than we could with our previous tools.- Changed development practices, making an effort to increase our reuse of code and decrease time spent, achieving a 66% savings over our budget in one project. - Updated our source control from Subversion to Git gently transitioning our repositories and training our staff.- Assisted our sales staff with budgeting new projects and assessing potential functionality for clients.

Blacksburg, Va

- Managed entire projects for university groups and departments from the initial discovery meetings all the way to delivery and training.- Designed and developed sites for multiple groups including our own website, no cobblers children syndrome here.

Parkton, Md

- Created and maintained first iteration of the company's website.- Helped developer build second iteration and maintained it as well.

Timonium, Md

- Reworked much of the website, making the page creation process and editing process much easier. - Worked alongside the developers while they were creating a new content management system, creating and formatting content for a client on this new system.